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The (Re)Nationalization of

Congressional Elections
In the second half of the twentieth century, elections for the presidency, House, and Senate
exhibited a great deal of independence, but the outcomes of congressional elections today
are much more closely aligned with those of presidential elections. Split-ticket voting and the
incumbency advantage have declined and party candidates in different arenas increasingly
tend to win and lose together. Some analysts interpret these developments as evidence that
voters have become increasingly set in their partisan ways, but an alternative explanation
is that since the parties have sorted, each partys candidates now look alike, so voters have
much less reason to split their tickets. Few voters have a liberal Republican or a conservative
Democrat to vote for today.

MorrisP. Fiorina

Series No. 7

Partisan ideological realignment has not eliminated national tides in elections. It has, however reduced
their magnitude.AlanI. Abramowitz

The 2006, 2010, and 2014 congressional elections were not kind to the preceding
claim. As the political parties sorted, electoral patterns changed, but in a manner that
accentuated rather than dampened the likelihood of national tides. The outcomes of
presidential, congressional, and even state legislative elections now move in tandem
in a way that was rare in the mid- to late twentieth century, not just in the so-called
wave elections, but in elections more generally. Political scientists commonly describe
this development as nationalization. I write re-nationalization in the title of this essay
because contemporary elections have returned to a pattern that was common in earlier
periods of American history.1 When elections are nationalized, people vote for the
party, not the person. Candidates of the party at different levels of government win
and lose together. Their fate is collective.

AlanI. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy
(NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 110.
1Much of the data on recent congressional elections recalls patterns that prevailed from the midnineteenth century until the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century. Thus, current developments
aremore of a return to prior patterns than something new in our history.

Hoover Institution

A Hoover Institution Essay on Contemporary American Politics

All politics is local (no more)


Late twentieth-century political observers generally accepted this aphorism, credited
to Democratic Speaker of the House ThomasP. Tip ONeill of Massachusetts, who
served in Congress from 1952 to 1987. In retrospect the period in which ONeill served
might be viewed as the golden age of the individual member of Congress, especially
in the House.2 Party leadership was decentralized with committee and subcommittee
chairs operating relatively independently of the party floor leadership. Members could
pursue their policy interests relatively unconstrained by the positions of the leadership
or party caucus.3 Party discipline was weak, enabling members to adopt whatever
political coloring best suited their districts. Democratic representatives could take the
conservative side of issues, especially in the South, and Republicans could take the
liberal side, especially in the northeast. Bipartisanship and cross-party coalitions were
not at all uncommon.4 At the presidential level Democrats could fracture as the party
did in 1968 or lose in landslides as in 1972 and 1984, but voters would split their tickets
and return Democratic majorities to Congress. Members had learned to exploit every
advantage their incumbency offered and to build personal reputations that insulated
them from the national tides evident in the presidential voting.5
Throughout this period, Republicans had talked about their goal of nationalizing
congressional elections, by which they meant getting people to vote for congressional
candidates at the same levels that they voted for Republican presidential candidates.

2The allusion is to the golden age of the MP (member of Parliament) in eighteenth-century Britain before
the development of the modern responsible party system characterized by centralized party leadership and
strong party discipline. See Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London:
Macmillan, 1957).
3I use the modifier relatively in these sentences to recognize that there were limits on member
independence, of course. For example, a member could not vote against his partys nominee for speaker.
And in the aftermath of the 1964 elections, the Democratic caucus stripped the seniority of two members
who had endorsed Republican Barry Goldwater for president.
4For a good survey of how Congress operated during this period see Kenneth Shepsle, The Changing
Textbook Congress, in Can the Government Govern? ed. John Chubb and Paul Peterson (Washington, DC:
Brookings, 1989), 238267.
5The literature on these subjects is massive. For a review as the period drew to a close see Morris Fiorina
and Timothy Prinz, Legislative Incumbency and Insulation, Encyclopedia of the American Legislative
System, ed. JoelH. Silbey (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1994), 513527. For the most up-to-date
survey of congressional elections see GaryC. Jacobson and JamieL. Carson, The Politics of Congressional
Elections, 9th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

MorrisP. Fiorina The (Re)Nationalization of Congressional Elections

This would have resulted in Republican congressional majorities in big presidential


years like 1972 and 198084.6 But voters seemed content to behave in accord with
allpolitics is localuntil 1994.
The Republican wave in 1994 shocked not only pundits but even academic experts on
congressional elections. Republican gains were expected, to be sure, but most analysts
expected two dozen or so seats on the outside. Most of us dismissed as fanciful Newt
Gingrichs prediction that the Republicans would take the House.7 But when the
electoral dust settled, Republicans had netted fifty-four seats in the House and ten
in the Senate to take control of both chambers for the first time since the election of
1952. When political scientists looked back over the period, they saw that growing
nationalization had been underway for some time, but the signals had not been
recognized.8

Elections in the Era of Incumbency and Insulation


Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham first pointed out that the declining
correlation between presidential and congressional voting lessened the responsiveness
of the political system.9 That is, as incumbents insulated themselves from electoral
tides, the capacity of voters to hold the government as a whole accountable weakened.
In contrast to elections in the late nineteenth century, presidential coattails had
all but disappeared by the 1980s (figure1). Thus, fewer members of Congress felt
indebted to the president for their elections. Moreover, midterm seat losses in the
modern era were pale reflections of those that occurred in the late nineteenth century
(figure2). With most of their fates independent of his, members of the presidents
party had less incentive to help an administration of their party, especially if it
entailed any political cost to them. The unproductive relationship between President
Jimmy Carter and the large Democratic majorities in Congress epitomized this state
ofaffairs.

6Continued Democratic congressional strength in the South would have made it difficult to win a House
majority in a narrow presidential election.
7Hes blowing smoke, as I put it to a Congressional Quarterly reporter at the time. Wrong.
8See the essays in DavidW. Brady, JohnF. Cogan, and MorrisP. Fiorina, eds., Continuity and Change in
House Elections (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press and Hoover Institution Press, 2000).
9Walter Dean Burnham, Insulation and Responsiveness in Congressional Elections, Political Science
Quarterly 90, no.3 (Autumn 1975): 411435.

Hoover Institution Stanford University

Figure1. Presidential Coattails Declined in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Number of House Seats Gained /Lost by the Party


of the Elected President

100
80
60
40
20
0
1864

1876

1888

1900

1912

1924

1936

1948

1960

1972

1984

1996

2008

20
40
60

Source:
HaroldW. Stanley and RichardG. Niemi,Vital Statistics on American Politics 20132014(Washington DC: CQ Press, 2013).

Figure2. Midterm Seat Losses by the Party of the President Declined in the Second Half
of the 20th Century
20

66
19
74
19
82
19
90
19
98
20
06
20
14

58

19

50

19

42

19

34

19

26

19

18

19

10

19

02

19

94

19

86

18

78

18

70

18

18

18

62

Number of Seats Lost

20

40

60

80

100

120

Source:
HaroldW. Stanley and RichardG. Niemi,Vital Statistics on American Politics 20132014(Washington DC: CQ Press, 2013).

MorrisP. Fiorina The (Re)Nationalization of Congressional Elections

Figure3. The Incumbency Advantage in House Elections Has Declined from its
Mid-20th-Century Levels

12

10

52
19
55
19
58
19
61
19
64
19
67
19
70
19
73
19
76
19
79
19
82
19
85
19
88
19
91
19
94
19
97
20
00
20
03
20
06
20
09
20
12

19

46

19

49

19

Gelman-King Incumbency Advantage (Vote Percentage)

14

Source:
Calculations provided by Gary Jacobson.

The disassociation between the presidential and congressional electoral arenas


probably was both a cause and a consequence of the rapid growth in the advantage of
incumbency in the second half of the twentieth century. This terminology referred to
a personal vote, the additional support that incumbents could expect compared to
what any generic non-incumbent member of their party running in their district in a
given election could expect.10 Scholars identified numerous advantages of incumbency:
the growth in nonpartisan, non-ideological constituency service as the federal role
in society and the economy expanded, the decline in high-quality challengers as
local party organizations withered and became too weak to recruit and fund strong
candidates, and, later, the widening campaign funding advantage incumbents enjoyed.
Various measures of the incumbency advantage appear in the literature, but the one
with the firmest statistical basis is that of Andrew Gelman and Gary King.11 As figure3

10Bruce Cain, John Ferejohn, and Morris Fiorina, The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral
Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
11Andrew Gelman and Gary King, Estimating Incumbency Advantage without Bias, American Journal of
Political Science 34 (1990): 11421164.

Hoover Institution Stanford University

Figure4. Split Presidential and House Majorities in Congressional Districts Today Are
the Lowest in a Century
50
45

Percentage of Split Districts

40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1900

1908

1916

1924

1932

1940

1948

1956

1964

1972

1980

1988

1996

2004

2012

Source:
HaroldW. Stanley and RichardG. Niemi,Vital Statistics on American Politics 20132014(Washington DC:
CQ Press, 2013).

shows, from the mid-1950s to the late 1990s the estimated advantage fluctuated
between 6 and 12percentage points until beginning a downward trend in the
newcentury.12
Figure4 provides what is perhaps the most striking illustration of the growing
disassociation between the presidential and electoral arenasthe growth in the
proportion of congressional districts that cast their votes for the presidential
candidate of one party while electing a member of the other party to the House
of Representatives. In the late nineteenth century when straight-ticket voting was
prevalent, such split district majorities were rare, but they jumped after 1920 and
increased rapidly after World War II, culminating in elections like 1972 and 1984
when nearly half the districts in the country split their decisions. This development

12For a recent comprehensive analysis of the decline in the incumbency advantage see Gary Jacobson,
Its Nothing Personal: The Decline of the Incumbency Advantage in US House Elections, Journal of Politics 77,
no.3 (July2015): 861873.

MorrisP. Fiorina The (Re)Nationalization of Congressional Elections

Figure5. Split Ticket (President/House) Voting Has Declined

% Splitting Presidential and Congressional Vote

50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1952 1956 1960 1964 1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012

Source:
ANES

and its reversal in recent elections had important incentive effects. Suppose that
after President Reagans reelection in 1984, Speaker ONeill had decided to follow
the kind of oppositional strategy that congressional Republicans have adopted
during the Obama presidency. Had he announced his strategy to the Democratic
caucus, they likely would have rejected it. In 1985, 114 Democratic representatives
held districts carried by Reagan. They might well have said, Wait a minute, Tip.
I have to be carefulReagan won my district. I cant just oppose everything he
proposes. Contrast that situation with 2013 when only sixteen House Republicans
came from districts that voted for Obama in 2012. An overwhelming majority of
the Republican conference saw little electoral danger in opposing Obamas every
proposal.
The decline in split outcomes reflects the decline in split-ticket voting shown in
figure5. During the height of the incumbency era, a quarter to a third of voters
splittheir ballots between the presidential and House levels. Since 1980 that figure
has dropped in every election but one. By 2012 it had declined to only half the
1984figure.

Hoover Institution Stanford University

Figure6. Split Party Senate Delegations Have Declined in Recent Decades


Number of Split U.S. Senate Delegations by Congress
1967Present
30

Split Delegations

25

20

15

10
90

95

100

105

110

Congress
Source:
Christopher P. Donnelly, Balancing Act? Testing a Theory of Split-Party U.S. Senate Delegations, January 2015.

For a number of reasons, Senate elections are more difficult for political scientists
to study. Only thirty-three or thirty-four states hold them every two years, making
statistical analysis iffy. Moreover, it is not the same third of the Senate that runs
every two years, and the third of states that holds elections in a presidential year next
holds them in an off-year, and vice-versa. For all these reasons, political scientists tend
to focus on the 435 House elections held every two years. But patterns analogous to
those discussed have appeared in Senate elections as well, despite the noisier data.
As figure6 shows, the number of states that elected one senator from each party rose
sharply in the same period as split outcomes in the presidential and House arenas
surged, peaking in 1978 when twenty-six of the fifty states were represented in
Washington by one senator from each party.13 This number dropped in half
by 2002 but then began to rise again. I know of no research that explains this
recent development. But despite the unexplained recent trend, it is clear that

13ThomasL. Brunell and Bernard Grofman, Explaining Divided US Senate Delegations, 17881996:
ARealignment Approach, American Political Science Review 92, no.2 (June1998): 391399.

MorrisP. Fiorina The (Re)Nationalization of Congressional Elections

Figure7. The National Component of the House Vote Now Exceeds the Personal/Local
Component
1

0.8

Estimated Coefficient

House Vote
0.6

0.4

0.2

Presidential Vote
0

0.2

1954

1958

1966

1970

1974

1978

1986

1990

1994

1998

2006

2010

2014

Source:
Calculations by Matthew Dickinson

states today show more consistency in their Senate voting than they did several
decades ago.14
A very striking demonstration of rising nationalization appears in figure7. Suppose
you wanted to predict the outcome of a midterm election in a specific district. Suppose
further that you had two pieces of information: (1) the Democratic presidential
candidates vote in that district two years earlier and (2) the Democratic congressional
candidates vote in that district two years earlier. Almost everyone would guess that
the second piece of information is the more important of the two, especially since in
the vast majority of the districts one of the candidatesthe incumbentis the same
candidate who ran two years prior. Congressional election researchers typically treat

14Special elections for the House have some of the same characteristics as Senate electionsthere arent
many of them and they are held in very different electoral contexts. Thus, it is interesting that a statistically
significant effect of presidential approval shows up in special election results beginning with the 2002
election. That is, special elections have become more nationalized. H. Gibbs Knotts and JordanM. Ragusa,
The Nationalization of Special Elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, Journal of Elections, Public
Opinion and Parties 26, no.1 (2016): 2239.

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10

the presidential vote as capturing the national forces at work in an electionthe


state of the economy, domestic tranquility or lack thereof, peace and war, and so
forth, while the congressional vote captures the local, more individualized, more
personal factors at work. Statistically speaking, the local component of the vote was
more important until the turn of the new century, although the relative strength of
the national component had been increasing.15 In 2006, however, the lines crossed
and thenational component has continued to be more important. Today one can
better predict the winners vote in a congressional district using the districts previous
presidential vote than its previous House vote.
Finally, although there is little research on state level elections, there are indications
that the growing nationalization of national elections has extended downward to the
state level as well. Gubernatorial outcomes increasingly track presidential results, and
David Byler reports a simple analysis of the relationship between the presidential vote
in a state and the number of legislative seats won.16 The relationship has fluctuated
considerably since World War II, but after falling to a low and statistically insignificant
level in 1988, it has steadily risen since. Moreover, recall the discussion in the first
essay of this series of the hundreds of legislative seats lost in the midterm waves
of 2006, 2010, and 2014. In recent decades state elections too seem to be showing
increasing evidence of nationalization.
Within the political science community there is general agreement that party
sorting, which has produced more internally homogeneous parties, underlies the
movements shown in the figures presented above. But in my view a number of
observers have erroneously located the cause almost entirely in party sorting in
the electorate. For example, Gary Jacobson writes that the incumbency advantage
has fallen in near lockstep with a rise in party loyalty and straight-ticket voting,
a consequence of the widening and increasingly coherent partisan divisions in the

15This analysis was originally conducted by David Brady, Robert DOnofrio, and Morris Fiorina,
The Nationalization of Electoral Forces Revisited, in Continuity and Change in House Elections,
ed. Brady, Cogan, and Fiorina. It has been updated over the years by Arjun Wilkins and Matthew
Dickinson.
16Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, My Old Kentucky Home: Could Matt Bevin Soon Be in the Governors
Mansion? Sabatos Crystal Ball, July16, 2015, www.centerforpolitics.org /crystalball/articles/my-old
-kentucky-home- could-matt-bevins-soon-be-the-governors-mansion/; David Byler, 2016 Presidential
Election Could Decide State Legislative Races, Real Clear Politics, January14, 2015, www.realclearpolitics
.com/articles/2015/01/14/presidential_election_could_decide_ state_legislative_races.html.

MorrisP. Fiorina The (Re)Nationalization of Congressional Elections

11

American electorate.17 Abramowitz agrees: The decline in ticket-splitting can be


traced directly to increasing partisan-ideological consistency within the electorate.18
To some extent that is surely the case, but such conclusions overlook the increasing
partisan-ideological consistency among the candidates. Fifty years ago a New Jersey
Democrat and a New Mexico Democrat faced different primary electorates. Today
both cater to coalitions of public sector workers, racial and ethnic minorities, and
liberal cause groups like environmental and pro-choice organizations. Similarly, fifty
years ago Ohio and Oregon Republicans depended on different primary electorates.
Today both cater to business and professional organizations and conservative cause
groups like taxpayers and pro-gun and pro-life groups. This growing homogenization
of each partys candidates has been reinforced by developments in campaign finance.
Individual contributions increasingly come from ideologically committed donors
who hail from specific geographic areasTexas for Republicans, Manhattan and
Hollywood for Democrats.19 And while anonymity prevents similar research for
contributions toindependent committees and other recipients of dark money,
the same is probablytrue for campaign funds that come through those avenues. No
matterwhatstate or district you come from, if you need contributions from Texas
oil interests or Hollywood liberals, you are going to lean in their direction.20 Recent
research suggests that these trends may extend to congressional primary elections
aswell.21
Now, if Democratic presidential and House candidates are nearly all liberals endorsed
and supported by the same liberal groups and organizations, and Republican
presidential and House candidates are nearly all conservatives endorsed and supported
by conservative organizations and groups, one major reason to split your ticket has

17Jacobson, Its Nothing Personal, 861862.


18Abramowitz, Disappearing Center, 96.
19JamesG. Gimpel, FrancesE. Lee, and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, The Check Is in the Mail: Interdistrict
Funding Flows in Congressional Elections, American Journal of Political Science 52, no.2 (April2008):
373394. See also MichaelJ. Barber, Representing the Preferences of Donors, Partisans, and Voters in
theUS Senate, special issue, Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (March2016): 225249.
20Tina Daunt, Obama, Hollywood Huddle to take back Senate, House, The Hill, April6, 2016,
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/house-races/275386 -obama-hollywood-huddle-to-take-back
-senate-house.
21Primary challengers, particularly ideological primary challengers, are raising more money, and
theyare raising much of that money from donors who do not reside in their states or districts. Robert
G.Boatright, Getting Primaried: The Changing Politics of Congressional Primary Challenges (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2013), 137.

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12

disappeared.22 The simple fact is that we dont know how many voters would split
their tickets if they were offered chances to vote for conservative Democratic or liberal
Republican House candidates because the parties offer them few such choices anymore.
Consider that in the 2012 elections in West Virginia, Mitt Romney shellacked Barack
Obama by a margin of 26.8percentage points at the same time that Democratic
Senator Joe Manchin thumped his Republican opponent by a margin of 24percentage
points. If one assumes that everyone who voted for Obama also voted for Manchin,
which seems reasonable, the implication is that 25percent of West Virginians split
their tickets, voting for Romney and Manchin. Are West Virginians unusual in their
willingness to ticket-split, or are they just unusual in having the opportunity to vote
for a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat?
Similarly, noting that self-identified liberals increasingly vote for Democratic
congressional candidates and self-identified conservatives for Republicans,
New York Times columnist Charles Blow opines, We have retreated to our
respective political corners and armed ourselves in an ideological standoff over
the very meaning of America.23 Such a conclusion is not justified. Liberal and
conservative voters may nothave changed at all. Compared to a couple of
decades ago, in how many House districts today does a liberal voter have a
liberal Republican candidate she could vote for, and in how many districts does
a conservative voter have a conservative Democratic candidate he could vote for?
Commentators have blithely equated the lackof opportunity to make the kind of
choices made in the past with unwillingness to make the kind of choices made in the
past. As I discussed in the third essay in this series, ordinary voterseven many
strong partisansare still much less well-sorted than high-level members of the
political class. Thus, I believe that the increased similarity of partisan candidates

22Readers familiar with my earlier policy-balancing hypothesis will understandably ask how the
decline in split-ticket voting relates to the balancing hypothesis. While researchers reported some crosssectional support for balancing, temporally speaking, as the parties diverged, more balancing (split-ticket
voting) should have occurred. The fact that it declined indicates either that the balancing hypothesis is
wrong or (I would prefer to think) that its effect has been overwhelmed by other factors. See Morris
Fiorina, Divided Government, chap. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1992). But see RobertS. Erikson, Congressional
Elections in Presidential Years: Presidential Coattails and Strategic Voting, Legislative Studies Quarterly 41,
no.3 (August2016): 551574. Eriksons analysis indicates that balancing occurs but is dominated
by coattails.
23CharlesM. Blow, The Great American Cleaving, New York Times, November5, 2010, www.nytimes.com
/2010/11/06/opinion/06blow.html?ref=charlesmblow.

MorrisP. Fiorina The (Re)Nationalization of Congressional Elections

13

is at least as important a part of the explanation for the decline in ticket-splitting


as the not-so-increased similarity of partisan voters. 24 Only the appearance of
candidates like Donald Trump whose positions cut across the standard party
platforms can let us determine whether electoral stability results from stable
voters or similar candidates. Speaking purely as an electoral analyst, I would say
that the data generated by nominations of non-standard candidates like Senator
Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Trump, and third-party candidates would enhance our
understanding of the contemporary electorate.

Are More Nationalized Elections Good or Bad?


This question is related to the one asked at the conclusion of the fourth essay. In
contrast to the elections of the late twentieth century when Democratic members of
Congress could regularly win despite the travails of their presidential candidates, the
electoral fates of candidates at different levels are intertwined. When combined with
the tendency to overreach discussed in the fifth essay, the result contra Abramowitz
can be wave elections like those of 2006, 2010, and 2014 that drastically change
governing arrangements over a short period.
Here again there are arguments on both sides. On the plus side, more members of each
party are held collectively responsible than previously, giving them more incentive to
focus on policies that advance the interests of the country as a whole and less incentive
to focus on, say, how many pork-barrel projects they can get for their districts. On
the negative side, the disruption of government control gives parties very little time
to pass and implement their programs. Some decades ago I argued for more collective
responsibility on the part of the parties; whether it has gone too far is now the
question.25

24An additional factor underlying the decline in split-ticket voting may well be that with the close
party divide, voters realize that they are actually voting for an entire party, not just for individuals.
For example, the seats of liberal Republicans like Chris Shays of Connecticut (defeated) and Marge
Roukema of New Jersey (retired) became untenable not because they were personally unpopular
butbecause voters in their districts understood that they would be part of a congressional majority
theydisliked.
25Morris Fiorina, The Decline of Collective Responsibility in American Politics, Daedalus
109 (Summer 1980): 2545. Cf. MorrisP. Fiorina, with SamuelJ. Abrams, Disconnect: The
Breakdown of Representation in American Politics, chap. 7 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma
Press, 2009).

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14

Table1. Popular Reaction to Wave Elections

Interestingly, the American electorate


shows mixed feelings about the

Feel Happy About

1994 Republican Victory

57

Research Center regularly queries

2006 Democratic Victory

60

2010 Republican Victory

48

voters about their satisfaction with the

2014 Republican Victory

48

Source:
Pew Research Center

current state of affairs. The Pew

election result. As table1 reports, the


voters collective minds have shown
achange across the most recent wave
elections. Solid majorities were happy
about thethrashings of the Clinton

Democrats in 1994 and the Bush Republicans in 2006. But only minorities registered
satisfaction with the two more recent waves. It is almost as if voters are collectively
saying, This hurts us as much as it hurts you, but given your overreach, we have
to do it.

MorrisP. Fiorina The (Re)Nationalization of Congressional Elections

15

Essay Series
An Era of Tenuous Majorities: A Historical Context
Has the American Public Polarized?
The Political Parties Have Sorted
Party Sorting and Democratic Politics
The Temptation to Overreach
Independents: The Marginal Members of an Electoral Majority
The (Re)Nationalization of Congressional Elections
Is the US Experience Exceptional?
A Historical Perspective
Post-Election

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Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

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Series Overview

About the Author

MorrisP. Fiorina
Morris Fiorina is the Wendt Family
Professor of Political Science at
Stanford University and a senior
fellow at the Hoover Institution. For
more than four decades he has
written on American politics with
particular emphasis on elections
and public opinion. Fiorina has
written or edited twelve books and
more than 100 articles, served as
chairman of the Board of the
American National Election Studies,
and received the WarrenE. Miller
Career Achievement Award from
the American Political Science
Association Section on Elections,
Public Opinion, and Voting
Behavior. His widely noted book
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized
America (with Samuel Abrams and
Jeremy Pope) is thought to have
influenced then Illinois state
senator Barack Obamas keynote
speech to the 2004 Democratic
National Convention (We coach
Little League in the blue states, and,
yes, weve got some gay friends in
the red states).

Hoover Institution, Stanford University


434 Galvez Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6003
650-723-1754

In contrast to most of modern American political history, partisan


control of our national elective institutions has been unusually
tenuous during the past several decades. This essay series argues that
the ideologically sorted parties that contest elections today face strong
internal pressures to overreach, by which I mean emphasizing issues and
advocating positions strongly supported by the party base but which
cause the marginal members of their electoral coalitions to defect.
Thus, electoral losses predictably follow electoral victories. Institutional
control is fleeting.
The first group of essays describes the contemporary American
electorate. Despite myriad claims to the contrary, the data show that
the electorate is no more polarized now than it was in the later decades
of the twentieth century. What has happened is that the parties have
sorted so that each party is more homogeneous than in the twentieth
century; liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats have largely
passed from the political scene. The muddled middle is as large as ever
but has no home in either party. The growth in the proportion of selfidentified independents may be a reflection of the limited appeal of
todays sorted parties.
The second group of essays develops the overreach argument, discusses
the role of independents as the marginal members of an electoral
majority, and explains how party sorting produces less split-ticket
voting. Rather than most voters being more set in their partisan
allegiances than a generation ago, they may simply have less reason to
split their tickets when almost all Democratic candidates are liberals and
all Republican candidates are conservatives.
The third group of essays embeds contemporary American politics in
two other contexts. First, in a comparative context, developments in
the European democracies are the mirror image of those in the United
States: the major European parties have depolarized or de-sorted or
both, whereas their national electorates show little change. The rise of
anti-immigrant parties may have some as yet not well-understood role
in these developments. Second, in a historical context, the instability of
American majorities today resembles that of the late nineteenth century,
when similar significant social and economic changes were occurring.
A final postelection essay will wrap up the series.

These essays naturally draw on the work of many people who have
contributed to a very active research program. I thank colleagues John
Aldrich, Douglas Ahler, Paul Beck, Bruce Cain, James Campbell, Shanto
Iyengar, Matthew Levendusky, Sandy Maisel, Paul Sniderman, and
Guarav Sood, whose questions forced me to sharpen various arguments;
and David Brady in particular for almost daily conversations about the
matters covered in the posts that follow.

Hoover Institution in Washington


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